Meetings on the Stair
by SentientCitizen
Summary: River Tam lurks in a stairwell, while Rodney McKay learns to listen.


**Title:** Meetings on the Stair

**Word Count:** ~2,800

**Notes/Disclaimers:** Generic spoiler-type things for SGA through to about the middle of season two, and probably some implied spoilers for Serenity. I don't own these characters or their shows, and I'm making no profit. I'm just going for a frolic in their world! A frolic on which I was joined by my beta, Sophia_Sol, whose insight helped this fic to suck less. :) Reviews are always appreciated, and concrit is always welcome.

***

"Note to self: get better lackeys."

"You know we can hear you, Rodney, yes?" came Radek Zelenka's weary voice through his radio.

"Um, yes?" Rodney said, scowling down at the screen of his modified life-signs detector. "That would be the point?" Currently, the little device's screen was showing the source of the intermittent power drain in red, almost directly on top of his own little life-sign dot in green. "Also, which one of your idiots programmed this thing? It's saying I should be right on top of it, but there's nothing here!"

"There is a hidden staircase behind the panel to your left, Rodney," Zelenka's voice instructed. "I suspect that your power drain is part of the way up or down a level."

"Which just says to me that you should be the one out here hunting power spikes, while I direct operations from the nice, cozy lab. You're clearly much better at this sort of hands-on grunt-work." Tucking the life-signs detector beneath one arm, Rodney began running his fingertips over the wall, trying to coax the panel open.

"Ah, but unfortunately you are foolish and arrogant enough to promise my choice of reward should I beat you at chess. Open the panel, Rodney."

"I'm trying!" he hissed – and the panel hissed right back at him, as long-neglected seals released their grip, and the hidden door swung open. Sure enough, it revealed a flight of stairs. Rodney scowled at them, on general principle, then began stomping his way up the spiralling staircase.

And there, just around the first spiral, was a girl with flyaway black hair.

Rodney froze. "Who – you - _what_?"

She smiled faintly, her circa-the-sixties dress and ballet-dancer poise contrasting with the cool blue walls of Atlantis to make her seem completely unreal. "She wants you to listen," the girl admonished him gently. "She's dying of thirst with an ocean in her belly – a River just isn't enough."

For a long moment, Rodney stared at her. "You can't be here!" he blurted out finally. "I mean, you really _can't_, there's just no way!"

"Rodney? Rodney, what is going on?" Zelenka's voice was asking in his ear, but Rodney ignored him.

The girl giggled, and whirled away, skipping up the stairs. Startled into movement, Rodney scrambled after her – he was just a turn of the staircase behind her, he was _sure_, but when the steps dead-ended on the next level, she was nowhere to be seen.

***

"I'm perfectly fine!" Rodney insisted, at top volume. One of the newer nurses flinched – the others, fully accustomed to the side-show that was Rodney McKay Receiving Medical Attention, hardly seemed to even register his presence. "I'm telling you, she was _there_!"

Sheppard remained, to all appearances, calm. Even faintly amused. Which was pissing Rodney off – this was something like their fifth or sixth time around this argument, and if Sheppard wasn't going to give way, he could at least have the decency to be even a fraction of a percent as annoyed as Rodney was. "And I'm telling you, McKay, that my men combed the place, and Zelenka ran about a million scans, and everything we turned up confirms what the control room monitors say: you were the only one on the stairway. Which means that you really need to sit back and let Beckett run his tests, so we can get to the bottom of this."

McKay flailed one arm in an angry gesture, nearly taking out the doctor trying to take yet another blood sample. "Subjecting myself to voodoo science isn't what I call 'getting to the bottom of this'! Letting me go back to my labs to re-run Zeleka's tests, _properly_, that's what'll get us to the bottom of this!"

"Occam's razor says Beckett is our best chance," Sheppard said cheerfully.

McKay snorted, his mouth twisting downward into a sneer. "Occam means less than nothing in Pegasus! We're in the home of the weird and horrifically deadly – and the sooner you let me out of here, the sooner I can figure out what this is about and work on saving us from whatever fresh new horror this whole experience heralds! Sheppard? Sheppard? Colonel, _are you even listening to me_?"

***

Beckett insisted on keeping him overnight, with a stern warning to come right back if he experienced any further hallucinatory episodes. Rolling his eyes, Rodney agreed, then fled from the infirmary to his lab, before Beckett could change his mind.

Cracking his knuckles, Rodney dove in. First, he looked at the records from the life signs detector. No sign of a second signal in the stairway, and no sign of any outside tampering with the detector. Fine, then. There could be any number of reasons for that. He ran radiation tests, air composition tests, heat scans, light-spectrum analysis. He ran every test Radek had run, a few Radek hadn't thought of, and at least three that Radek hadn't done because, well, they were virtually useless.

"Rodney. You have run this test twice now, and always your results are the same as mine. Perhaps it is time to accept that–"

"Bring me more coffee or stop talking, Zelenka," Rodney snapped.

But slowly, inevitably, Rodney had to acknowledge that science was failing him. The girl might as well have been a ghost, for all that his scans and sensors cared – she was a blank spot in the records. She simply wasn't there. Frustrated, forced to a crawling pace by Elizabeth's unreasonable demands that he work on other, "more relevant" projects, Rodney found himself drawn to the hidden stairway, time and time again.

And then, one day, the girl was there again. She smiled when she saw him. "Yesterday upon the stair, he met a girl who wasn't there," she chanted, sing-song. "She wasn't there again today. He wants, he wants, her gone away."

Rodney's eyes narrowed. "You! You - you made me look like an idiot in from of my staff! And then Beckett poked and prodded at me for _hours_! I don't see why the man could possibly need that much of my blood, unless he's secretly some kind of Scottish vampire –"

"Several Pegasus-breed infections and mutations can only be detected with test-to-destruction methods, therefore requiring unusual quantities of blood," she interrupted. She looked amused, like she was dealing with a slow yet still beloved child.

Rodney stared at her, rant derailed. His mouth slanted unhappily downward. "Who _are_ you?" he demanded.

She rolled her eyes. "I _told_ you. I'm River."

"You told me no such thing!" he protested. "_And why are you here?_"

"Told you that, too. You never _listen_, Rodney McKay – and that's your problem. You need to listen, or you'll never hear her. She gets lonely, talking to herself." Then the girl – River – whirled, and bounded back up the stairs.

"Hear _who_? Hey, wait – get back here! How about some actual _information_ rather than cryptic riddles, huh?"

But she was already gone.

***

Unsurprisingly, Rodney kept his second encounter to himself. He wasn't going crazy – he was fairly sure insanity didn't come so, so specific. Not to mention to _annoying_. Besides, if they locked him up in the infirmary, Atlantis would have to rely on Zelenka to get them out of whatever the death-defying problem-du-jour was, and Rodney McKay had no intention of trusting his life to his minions. There was a _reason_ they were the minions, and not the boss.

He ran all the tests again - nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not a thing that Rodney tried produced any sort of result – the readings kept coming back stubbornly blank. As far as the computers were concerned, the girl had never been there.

He started to get desperate. He even went so far as trying to actually pay attention to Elizabeth during their weekly staff meeting, just in case she was the "her" River had referred to. It didn't seem to make a difference.

In a fit of genius – and desperation - he charted the stairwell power spikes against his sightings of the girl. The data was nothing like conclusive. He did find two reasonably large power spikes just moment before her appearances, but two points does not a pattern make – still, it was a working theory, so he set his computer to alert him when the power drain hit those levels again.

It took more than a few false alarms to fine-tune the system.

Then, one late night, his program bleated him out of a deep sleep. Cursing under his breath, he staggered off to the hidden panel.

River was waiting for him. She looked angry, this time. "She's crying," she told Rodney, curtly. "She's crying so loud that I can't hear Serenity. She woke me up, and made Simon worry, and it's _all your fault_. She brought me out past the edge of the black and sideways through time, time like a river, just to talk to you, and you're not _listening_. You're such a _boob_."

Rodney blinked, not sure he'd heard that word right. "I'm a what?"

She shot him a look of pure frustration. "See? You have to _listen_!"

Then she stomped up the stairs and was gone.

***

Rodney spent a week listening, as best he could, to every "her" in his life. Katie was delighted – she enthused that he was all but a changed man. Teyla started to look at him oddly. Elizabeth seemed confused, but seemed to decide not to look a gift horse in the mouth. He listened and listened until he thought he'd burst with all the insults he'd packed away in his head, all the scathing comments he didn't unleash. It was frustrating – maddening, really – and he slipped up sometimes. Well. Lots of times. But he was trying.

Miko started to smile more and quake less, something he'd thought was impossible, but otherwise the universe failed to change in any meaningful sort of way.

Except, well, "listening" was somewhat habit-forming. And slowly, inescapably, it started spilling over into the rest of his life. Sitting at lunch with the team one day, he found himself so focused on paying attention to all the sounds around him that he failed to react as the conversation slowly petered out.

"McKay," Sheppard said, eventually.

"Mmm."

"You feeling alright, McKay?"

"Wait, what?" Rodney startled into alertness. "Why?

A pause. "You've been awfully... quiet."

Rodney was taken aback for a moment. He _had_ been awfully quiet. Then he snorted. "Please. I was just stunned into silence by the sheer idiocy of your ideas."

Sheppard grinned; Ronon rolled his eyes, and even Teyla smiled as Rodney flailed and stuffed food into his mouth and proceeded to rip Sheppard`s ideas to shreds. He was careful not to zone out like that in public again – a military-enforced trip to Beckett was not his idea of a fun afternoon.

Rodney started to wonder if maybe River's not asking him for something a little more esoteric than just well, listening. Which was ridiculous and unscientific and, well, he was living in the place where the Ancients became super-powered beings by sitting and thinking really hard, so maybe it was worth a try or something. He resolved to ask Teyla about meditation lessons, and then forgot about his resolution completely when they discovered Project Arcturus.

When he returned from Doranda, shaken and angry at himself and wracked with guilt at the look on Sheppard's face, his program informed him that it was registering another energy spike on the stairwell. Running on autopilot, he wound his way through the corridors, opened the panel, and found River sitting there.

She smiled, and her eyes were sad. "Scientists playing god, fingers in the sugar bowl, touching things they shouldn't with no one to rap their knuckles and send them to their rooms. People like you making people like me."

It suddenly occurred to Rodney that River herself might be the "she" that she keeps referring to – so he tried to listen to her words, to really chew them over. He didn't want to – his mind flinched away from it. He wanted to forgot all about Doranda, forget that any of it ever happened. And what did she mean, anyways, by "people like me"? Was she some kind of robot? A hologram?

She sighed. "Trust your eyes – and trust your ears. You should have listened to Radek." Rising, she turned, and made her slow, graceful way up the stairs. In moments, she was out of sight, and Rodney found himself alone.

***

The next morning, he went to Teyla, and tried to explain.

"I need to learn to listen," he said, choosing his words carefully. This would be a bad time, he suspected, to have her start acting all insulted about some seemingly innocuous thing, like her complete ignorance in the hard sciences, or her people's ridiculously superstitious religion. "I need to learn to listen... better." He winced, the words sounding lame even to his ears. "Um. Like, meditating, or something. Listening to, um, deeper stuff." Oh, God, what was he, _three_?

But Teyla – he could have _kissed her_ - seemed to understand. "Meditation is sometimes used among my people as a method with which to grow closer to one's surroundings. To seek a union of spirit with one's world. Is this what you mean, Doctor McKay?" She inclined her head graciously, waiting for an answer.

_Was_ that what he meant? How the hell was he supposed to know? But it sounded like a place to start, at least. "Sure."

She eyed him askance, with that patented Teyla I'm-raising-my-eyebrow-because-I'm-far-too-polite-to-call-you-a-complete-idiot, are-you-sure-you-want-to-do-that look. "Then meet me in my room tomorrow, after my practise session with Colonel Sheppard, and we shall see what can be done."

***

Meditation was both harder and easier that Rodney thought it would be. He didn't make nearly as much progress as he thought he ought to – he _is_ a genius after all, and if hordes of granola-munching hippies can manage meditation, how hard can it be? – but Teyla assured him he was improving, so he kept at it.

It was about his eighth or ninth session when he started hearing, very faintly, music.

Cheating slightly, he cracked his eyes open. Teyla appeared to still be completely serene, utterly unfazed by the sound. "Um."

Now Teyla's veneer of serenity cracked slightly – they've already had the "why we don't talk while meditating" discussion. Several times.

Hastily, Rodney continued, "Sorry, I just – do you hear music?"

Teyla's eyes opened. "No, Doctor McKay. I do not." Her tone brooked no argument, and Rodney meekly complied. He'd learned a lot about listening since he started doing this – or at least, he'd learned about the consequences of claiming to want to learn to mediate, and then refusing to listen to your teacher. Teyla didn't seem to mind if he saved up his ranting and dark mutterings for when the session was over; so long as he kept quiet while she sought inner peace or whatever she was doing while Rodney tried to learn to listen, she wouldn't smack him with her sticks.

He'd also learned not to mock the sticks.

But the longer he sat there, listening as Teyla had taught him to, the louder the music grew. It was both completely alien and yet somehow oddly familiar – it touched the same sort of feelings in him that, oh, the best of Mozart's piano concertos used to, back when Rodney still played.

He wasn't yet quite certain how freaked out about this he should be.

When he returned to his room, his computer dinged at him, and the music trilled a brief arpeggio. He didn't have to check the screen – he already knew. Music ringing in his ears, Rodney McKay made his way through the halls, to the hidden panel.

He opened it.

River was there, smiling beatifically at him. "You're listening."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Yes, yes, right. But what am I _hearing_?"

Leaning forward, she gave him two brief pecks, one on each cheek – startled, he didn't quite pull back in time. "I don't know," she told him. "A lover? A sister? A friend? I made introductions – now it's your turn. If you can hear, you can speak." She grinned, impishly. "She'll forgive you if you stammer. Doctors are never very good at talking to girls."

This time, Rodney followed her up the stairs, and she turned to wave at him before she walking straight into the wall and vanishing from sight. The surface of the wall rippled with her passage, then settled – when he touched it, lightly with one finger, it was smooth and solid again.

Rodney McKay sat down on the stairs, and, listening with all his might, asked the music, "Who are you?"

And suddenly, somehow, the notes contained words.

_Your people call me Atlantis. It's good to finally speak with you, Doctor Rodney McKay._


End file.
